Leading the Glass Industry to raise Manual Handling Training Standards for Glass Workers across Australasia

Background

CSR Viridian is the largest glass manufacturer in Australia and New Zealand.

By its very nature, glass is a difficult product to work with safely. As a whole, the industry has a high injury rate, the most common being manual handling injuries.

In order to keep around 1,000 workers safe across Australia and New Zealand, Viridian commissioned Digicast to produce a comprehensive, high quality training package.

The main objectives were to:

Increase worker understanding and knowledge about how to handle glass.

Reduce sprains and strains injuries.

Reduce the manual handling injury rate.

Be seen as the safety leaders in the inustry.

Refresh current staff easily on an "as-needs" basis.

Here’s how we solved the problem:

In order to engage workers and to clearly commnunicate how to undertake procedures safely, we designed a workplace training package that:

Centred around engaging video modules. Humans are more likely to recall visual information and we are amazing at remembering pictures. The right brain prefers visuals and can process pictures hundreds of times faster than text. By filming demonstrations of correct procedures and even developing a medical animation to highlight how the back gets injured during incorrect manual handling procedures, workers have quickly understood best practice.

Included a trainer's manual that incorporated lots of advanced learning techniques to keep the attention of worker's during the four hour training session. The session was designed to be as active as possible and included a multisensory environment, demonstrations with coaching, questions to encourage trainees to discuss manual handling experiences, as well as a quiz at the end.

Designed to foster worker alignment with the material by assigning each trainee with their own pocket sized handbook. Photos and graphic design elements were incorporated to encourage workers to refer to the manual when required. An iconic glass worker dude was included into all of the training materials such as the handbooks, video and posters, to help staff remember the information.

And here’s what happened:

Digicast worked with Viridian to create a successful launch campaign that included a launch event that staff were invited to at every manufacturing site. The launch included a video movie trailer, demonstrations and a comprehensive communication campaign to reiterate training objectives over a thee month period.

To date, the manual handling training video is currently being rolled out. Due to its high quality, it is also being rolled out to other glass manufacturing companies.

We expect to have results early next year.

For further information about creating effective workplace training packages, visit: